Life expectancy gap found to be growing

NEW YORK — The wealthiest Americans can expect to live at least a decade longer than the poorest — and that gap, as with income inequality, is growing ever wider.

New research in the Journal of the American Medical Association shows top earning Americans gained 2 to 3 years of life expectancy between 2001 and 2014, while those at the bottom gained little or nothing.

Research last year showed that mortality rates are rising among middle-aged whites, largely due to suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol.

The authors — economists from Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, consulting firm McKinsey & Co., and the U.S. Treasury — used anonymous Internal Revenue Service data from 1.4 billion tax records over 15 years and matched them to death records from the Social Security Administration.

The geographic differences in life expectancy for low-income people weren’t strongly explained by access to health care, the authors write.